Editorial: Kids Count data on poverty should prompt policy response

If we want to reduce the number of children living in poverty, we need to begin making different choices. If the Kids Count data released on Monday tells us anything, it may be that we're not even having the right conversations.

That nearly half of Calhoun County's youngest children are living in poor families is tragic, but the greater tragedy may be the utter absence of a cohesive, effective framework for systemic change in an area in which our community has lagged for decades.

The Annie E. Casey's annual Kids Count report, released Tuesday by the Michigan League for Public Policy, makes for grim reading.

Among the findings reported was the fact that about 45 percent of kids from birth to age 5 live in families eligible for food assistance, ranking Calhoun County 73rd out of 83 Michigan counties for child poverty.

Overall, about 29 percent of Calhoun County kids up to age 17 were impoverished in 2011, a 39 percent increase over 2005. And Calhoun County ranked No. 47 with 117.2 children per 1,000 living in homes investigated for abuse or neglect compared with the statewide average of 90 children per 1,000.

Across all indicators, we recorded a few gains but more losses when compared to other counties. For those who follow the issue, you might say the report was more of the same, and that might be the greatest tragedy of all.

The collection and dissemination of data is an important tool in driving public policy, but over time, the absence of an effective response to that data creates a sense of inevitability, as though current condition is beyond our ability to ameliorate.

That's wrong, and such an attitude is simply unacceptable.

In releasing the report, the Michigan League called on lawmakers to restore the state's Earned Income Tax Credit to 20 percent of the federal credit (lawmakers recently cut it to 6 percent), boost childcare subsidies for poor families, increase the state's $7.40 per hour minimum wage and invest in early childhood education.

These are sound proposals that nevertheless have little chance of being fully embraced by those in elected office. The reasons for that are complex, but among those reasons is the assumption that widespread poverty is the product of an uncontrollable market and a failure of individual responsibility.

That's wrong, too. Poverty, at least in the context of our state and our community, is the product of public policy. Markets aren't organic entities with lives of their own, but are designed and constructed by governments through laws, regulations and economic convention.

In our community, we tend to not talk about economic policy and poverty symbiotic forces. Sure, we see the importance of skills development and educational opportunities in creating pathways to opportunities, but those are limited, and too many of those pathways lead to jobs in which wages leave families struggling to feed their children and pay for shelter.

We use taxpayer money in the form of subsidies and incentives to lure employers, yet we create no expectation that real wages, which have been effectively flat for decades, rise with those investments.

Instead, the predominant approach of trying to alleviate poverty is through direct government assistance and the intervention of our prodigious nonprofit sector, both of which offer important but short-term answers to problems that demand systemic solutions.

Nothing about the data in this year's Kid Count report is inevitable, and there's no reason we should not expect - or demand - that elected leaders do right by the kids we're counting. They are, after all, counting on us.

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Editorial: Kids Count data on poverty should prompt policy response

If we want to reduce the number of children living in poverty, we need to begin making different choices. If the Kids Count data released on Monday tells us anything, it may be that we're not even